Using Our Products > For Universities

Feel confident. Pronounce the names of your students and alumni correctly.

When you are faced with the daunting task of pronouncing names of students from many ethnic backgrounds, we can help you.
With our NameSayer services, you can feel confident when you announce names at the podium during commencement.

We are experts in pronouncing people's names, with many years of experience.
Our team has accumulated knowledge about pronouncing names from many language backgrouonds.
Our services have been used for years by universities in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the UK.

Xiaoxin Zhang

shee-"ow!"-SHIN JAHNG

See expert phonetic spelling and hear the pronunciation for every student's name quickly and cost-effectively.

If your commencement readers are speakers of English, you'll get pronunciations that they can easily understand, not heavily-accented or foreign-language audio recordings and not phonetic spelling written by students, who don't know how to write phonetic spelling.

Let your students approve or correct the pronunciation .... or else record it themselves or type a description.

As a dean at an American or international university, you know how important commencement day is to your graduating students and their families.
Honor, respect, recognize, and impress your graduates as they march across the stage, culminating their years of work and achievement.
In a
GradImages survey asking
"What parts of commencement are important to you?",
86% of respondents said "being individually recognized, and hearing their name (or their loved one's name) called over the public address system was important. This trounced all other ceremony elements by wide margins".

We can help.

For each of your students, we provide:

- expert, intelligent phonetic spelling that is easy for an English-speaking announcer to interpret. Phonetic spellings that are provided by students are often inaccurate, since many students, especially non-native speakers, do not know how to write a phonetic spelling.

- highly intelligible audio in English generated by an English-speaking speech synthesizer. Audio that is recorded by students is often hard to understand if the speaker has a heavy foreign accent, or if the speaker speaks in a foreign language, or speaks in poor or noisy acoustic conditions.

We have a solid track record: universities have been using our services since 2007. We work closely with you to make sure you get what you need, and cost-effectively. Our university customers say:

"Using your software, we went from a huge undertaking that took us around three weeks down to approximately 1 day."

"This software is great, thanks!"

"Your customer service is FANTASTIC."

We offer 4 services:

Service 1. Use our affordable online NameSayer tool - $300 for a commencement season, for use by a university staff member.
- or $100 for 200 one-word names, for use by a university staff member for commencement.

Here's what you get:

Service 2. Use our quick NameSayer ...
- Starting at $500 Ideal if you have a lot of difficult-to-pronounce names and you just want an intelligent pronunciation for each one.

Upload your names from Excel and instantly get the phonetic spelling for each name.

NameSayer gives you the most common pronunciation for each name.

Download the phonetic spellings as a CSV file.

Our most popular service

Upload your student names from Excel and instantly get pronunciations with expert phonetic spelling and audio for every student.
You can include fields like major and degree.

Notify your students ... or ask us to do it. We're happy to do so.

Your students login and approve or correct the pronunciation of their name. NameSayer gives multiple pronunciations for names with more than one pronunciation - like Weinstein - so it's easy for students to choose. .... But if none is right, they can record it themselves or type a description.

90% of students who login approve a NameSayer pronunciation, so you know the pronunciations are accurate.College students often don't like to speak on the phone, so allowing them just to choose a correct pronunciation rather than record their names, will give you a high response rate.

Your commencement readers can login and practice well ahead of the ceremonies; seeing expert phonetic spelling and hearing pronounciation for every student makes it easy for them.

Just before commencement,
upload your walking list, including honors, and NameSayer produces a printable walking list with pronunciations or a list of phonetic spellings that you can print on your Walking cards.

Download the list to Excel, or just print it and bring it right to the podium. You can see and hear the pronunciation for each student.

Service 4. Have us help you ...

Send us a list of your names.

We provide our expert pronunciation for each name

We send you a website link or an Excel spreadsheet

Your readers can see expert phonetic spelling and hear audio for every person on your list.